Urdu

Urdu

Urdu, language belonging to the Indic group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. The official tongue of Pakistan, Urdu is also one of the 15 languages recognized in the 1950 Indian constitution. Urdu has been described as the written or literary variant of Hindustani that is used by Muslims. It is written in a modified form of the Arabic alphabet, and its basically Indic vocabulary has been enriched by borrowings from Arabic and Persian. Grammatically and phonetically, however, Urdu is an Indic language. About 100 million persons in Pakistan and India understand Urdu.

Urdu is a standardised register of Hindustani termed the standard dialectKhariboli. The grammatical description in this article concerns this standard Urdu. In general, the term "Urdu" can encompass dialects of Hindustani other than the standardised versions.

While, at the spoken level, Urdu and Hindi are considered dialects of a single language (or diasystem), they differ vastly in literary and formal vocabulary; where literary Urdu draws heavily on Persian and Arabic, literary Hindi draws heavily on Sanskrit and to a lesser extent Prakrit. The grammar of both Urdu and Hindi, however, are the same and derive from a Prakritic base. The main differences between the two are that Standard Urdu is conventionally written in Nastaliq calligraphy style of the Perso-Arabic script and draws vocabulary more heavily from Persian and Arabic than Hindi, while Standard Hindi is conventionally written in Devanāgarī and draws vocabulary from Sanskrit comparatively more heavily. Some linguists nonetheless consider Urdu and Hindi to be two standardized forms of the same language; however, others classify them separately due to sociolinguistic differences.

Speakers and geographic distribution

There are between 60 and 80 million native speakers of standard Urdu (Khari Boli). According to the SILEthnologue (1999 data), Hindi/Urdu is the fifth most spoken language in the world. According to George Weber’s article Top Languages: The World’s 10 Most Influential Languages in Language Today, Hindi/Urdu is the fourth most spoken language in the world, with 4.7 percent of the world's population, after Mandarin, English, and Spanish.
Because of Urdu's similarity to Hindi, speakers of the two languages can usually understand one another, if both sides refrain from using specialized vocabulary. Indeed, linguists sometimes count them as being part of the same language diasystem. However, Urdu and Hindi are socio-politically different, and people who self-describe as being speakers of Hindi would question their being counted as native speakers of Urdu, and vice-versa.

Official status

Urdu is the national language of Pakistan and is spoken and understood throughout the country. It shares official language status with English. It is used in education, literature, office and court business, media, and in religious institutions. It holds in itself a repository of the cultural and social heritage of the country. Although English is used in most elite circles, and Punjabi has a plurality of native speakers, Urdu is the lingua franca in Pakistan.

Urdu also spoken and written in Saudi Arabia by limited number of Arabs. In the holy cities of Mecca & Medina several important sign boards are written in Urdu along with Arabic & English.

Classification and related languages

Urdu is a member of the Indo-Aryan family of languages, which is in turn a branch of the Indo-Iranian group (which comprises the Indo-Aryan and the Iranian branches), which itself is a member of the Indo-European linguistic family. Urdu (along with Hindi) is considered to be a part of a dialect continuum which extends across eastern Iran, Afghanistan and modern Pakistan—right into eastern India. These idioms all have similar grammatical structures and share a large portion of their vocabulary. Punjabi, for instance, is very similar to Urdu; Punjabi written in the Shahmukhi script can be understood by speakers of Urdu with little difficulty, but spoken Punjabi has a very different phonology (pronunciation system) and can be harder to understand for Urdu speakers.

Dialects

Urdu has four recognised dialects: Dakhini, Pinjari, Rekhta, and Modern Vernacular Urdu (based on the Khariboli dialect of the Delhi region). Sociolinguists also consider Urdu itself one of the four major variants of the Hindi-Urdu dialect continuum.

Modern Vernacular Urdu is the form of the language that is least widespread and is spoken around Delhi and Lucknow while the Pakistani variant of the language spoken in Karachi and Lahore; it becomes increasingly divergent from the original form of Urdu as it loses some of the complicated Persian and Arabic vocabulary used in everyday terms.

Dakhini (also known as Dakani, Deccani, Desia, Mirgan) is spoken in Deccan region of southern India. It is distinct by its mixture of vocabulary from Marathi and Telugu language, as well as some vocabulary from Arabic, Persian and Turkish that are not found in the standard dialect of Urdu. In terms of pronunciation, the easiest way to recognize a native speaker is their pronunciation of the letter "qāf" (ﻕ) as "kh" (ﺥ). Dakhini is widely spoken in all parts of Maharashtra, Karnatka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Urdu is read and written as in other parts of India. A number of daily newspapers and several monthly magazines in Urdu are published in these states.

In addition, Rekhta (or Rekhti), the language of Urdu poetry, is sometimes counted as a separate dialect.

Phonology

Grammar

Levels of formality

Urdu in its less formalised register has been referred to as a rekhta (ریختہ, [reːxt̪aː]), meaning "rough mixture". The more formal register of Urdu is sometimes referred to as zabān-e-Urdu-e-mo'alla (زبانِ اردوِ معلہ, ), the "Language of Camp and Court".

The etymology of the word used in the Urdu language for the most part decides how polite or refined your speech is. For example, Urdu speakers would distinguish between پانی pānī and آب āb, both meaning "water" for example, or between آدمی ādmi and مرد mard, meaning "man". The former in each set is used colloquially and has older Hindustani origins, while the latter is used formally and poetically, being of Persian origin.

If a word is of Persian or Arabic origin, the level of speech is considered to be more formal and grand. Similarly, if Persian or Arabic grammar constructs, such as the izafat, are used in Urdu, the level of speech is also considered more formal and grand. If a word is inherited from Sanskrit, the level of speech is considered more colloquial and personal.

That distinction has likenesses with the division between words from a French or Old English origin while speaking English.

Politeness

Urdu is supposed to be a subtle and polished language; a host of words are used in it to show respect and politeness. This emphasis on politeness, which is reflected in the vocabulary, is known as adab and to some extent as takalluf in Urdu. These words are generally used when addressing elders, or people with whom one is not acquainted. For example, the English pronoun 'you' can be translated into three words in Urdu the singular forms tu (informal, extremely intimate, or derogatory) and tum (informal and showing intimacy called "apna pan" in Urdu) and the plural form āp (formal and respectful). Similarly, verbs, for example, "come," can be translated with degrees of formality in three ways:

آ‏ئے āiye/[aːɪje] or آ‏ئیں āen/[aːẽː] (formal and respectful)

آ‏و āo/[aːo] (informal and intimate with less degree)

آ ā/[aː] (extremely informal, intimate and potentially derogatory).

Vocabulary

Urdu has a vocabulary rich in words with Indic and Arabic. There are also a small number of borrowings from Turkish, Portuguese, and more recently English, but 80% vocabulary comes from Persian. Many of the words of Arabic origin have different nuances of meaning and usage than they do in Arabic.

Writing system

Nowadays, Urdu is generally written right-to left in an extension of the Persian alphabet, which is itself an extension of the Arabic alphabet. Urdu is associated with the Nasta’liq style of Arabic calligraphy, whereas Arabic is generally written in the modernized Naskh style. Nasta’liq is notoriously difficult to typeset, so Urdu newspapers were hand-written by masters of calligraphy, known as katib or khush-navees, until the late 1980s.

Historically, Urdu was also written in the Kaithi script. A highly-Persianized and technical form of Urdu was the lingua franca of the law courts of the British administration in Bengal, Bihar, and the North-West Provinces & Oudh. Until the late 19th century, all proceedings and court transactions in this register of Urdu was written officially in the Persian script. In 1880, Sir Ashley Eden, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal abolished the use of the Persian alphabet in the law courts of Bengal and Bihar and ordered the exclusive use of Kaithi, a popular script used for both Urdu and Hindi. Kaithi's association with Urdu and Hindi was ultimately eliminated by the political contest between these languages and their scripts, in which the Persian script was definitively linked to Urdu.

More recently in India, Urdu speakers have adopted Devanagari for publishing Urdu periodicals and have innovated new strategies to mark Urdū in Devanagari as distinct from Hindi in Devanagari. The popular Urdu monthly magazine, महकता आंचल (Mahakta Anchal), is published in Delhi in Devanagari in order to target the generation of Muslim boys and girls who do not know the Persian script. Such publishers have introduced new orthographic features into Devanagari for the purpose of representing Urdu sounds. One example is the use of अ (Devanagari a) with vowel signs to mimic contexts of ع (‘ain). To Urdu publishers, the use of Devanagari gives them a greater audience, but helps them to preserve the distinct identity of Urdu when written in Devanagari.

A list of the Urdu alphabet and pronunciation is given below. Urdu contains many historical spellings from Arabic and Persian, and therefore has many irregularities. The Arabic letters yaa and haa are split into two in Urdu: one of the yaa variants is used at the ends of words for the sound [i], and one of the haa variants is used to indicate the aspirated consonants. The retroflex consonants needed to be added as well; this was accomplished by placing a superscript ط (to'e) above the corresponding dental consonants. Several letters which represent distinct consonants in Arabic are conflated in Persian, and this has carried over to Urdu. The National Language Authority of the Government of Pakistan has finalized the list and collating order of Urdu letters.

Software

The Daily Jang was the first Urdu newspaper to be typeset digitally in Nasta’liq by computer. There are efforts underway to develop more sophisticated and user-friendly Urdu support on computers and the Internet. Nowadays, nearly all Urdu newspapers, magazines, journals, and periodicals are composed on computers via various Urdu software programs. The most widely used Nastaliq software is called "InPage". Pak Nastaleeq font released by Center of Excellence for Urdu Informatics is unicode based, workable in MSword ,having Ghost Characters Theory, recognised by UTC in 2008.

Transliteration In English

Urdu is occasionally also written in the Roman script. Roman Urdu has been used since the days of the British Raj, partly as a result of the availability and low cost of Roman movable type for printing presses. The use of Roman Urdu was common in contexts such as product labels. Today it is regaining popularity among users of text-messaging and Internet services and is developing its own style and conventions. Habib R. Sulemani says, "The younger generation of Urdu-speaking people around the world are using Romanised Urdu on the Internet and it has become essential for them, because they use the Internet and English is its language. A person from Islamabad chats with another in Delhi on the Internet only in Roman Urdū. They both speak the same language but with different scripts. Moreover, the younger generation of those who are from the English medium schools or settled in the west, can speak Urdu but can’t write it in the traditional Arabic script and thus Roman Urdu is a blessing for such a population."

Roman Urdu also holds significance among the Christians of North India. Urdū was the dominant native language among Christians of Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan in the early part of twentieth century and is still used by some people in these Indian states. Indian Christians often used the Roman script for writing Urdū. Thus Roman Urdū was a common way of writing among Indian Christians in these states up to the 1960s. The Bible Society of India publishes Roman Urdū Bibles which enjoyed sale late into the 1960s (though they are still published today). Church songbooks are also common in Roman Urdū. However, the usage of Roman Urdū is declining with the wider use of Hindi and English in these states. The major Hindi-UrduSouth Asian film industries, Bollywood and Lollywood, are also noteworthy for their use of Roman Urdū for their movie titles.

Usually, bare transliterations of Urdu into Roman letters omit many phonemic elements that have no equivalent in English or other languages commonly written in the Latin alphabet. It should be noted that a comprehensive system has emerged with specific notations to signify non-English sounds, but it can only be properly read by someone already familiar with Urdu, Persian, or Arabic for letters such as:ژ خ غ ط ص or ق and Hindi for letters such as ڑ. This script may be found on the Internet, and it allows people who understand the language but without knowledge of their written forms to communicate with each other.

Gloss (word-for-word)

Article 1: All humans free[,] and rights and dignity *('s) consideration from equal born are. To them conscience and intellect endowed is. Therefore, they one another *('s) brotherhood *('s) treatment do must.

Translation (grammatical)

Article 1: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience. Therefore, they should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Note:*('s) represents a possessive case which when written is preceded by the possessor and followed by the possessed, unlike the English 'of'.

Literature

Urdu has only become a literary language in recent centuries, as Persian and Arabic were formerly the idioms of choice for "elevated" subjects. However, despite its late development, Urdu literature boasts some world-recognised artists and a considerable corpus.

Poetry

Urdu has been the premier language of poetry in South Asia for two centuries, and has developed a rich tradition in a variety of poetic genres. The 'Ghazal' in Urdu represents the most popular form of subjective poetry, while the 'Nazm' exemplifies the objective kind, often reserved for narrative, descriptive, didactic or satirical purposes. Under the broad head of the Nazm we may also include the classical forms of poems known by specific names such as 'Masnavi' (a long narrative poem in rhyming couplets on any theme: romantic, religious, or didactic), 'Marsia' (an elegy traditionally meant to commemorate the martyrdom of Hazrat Imam Hussain, grandson of Muhammad, and his comrades of the Karbala fame), or 'Qasida' (a panegyric written in praise of a king or a nobleman), for all these poems have a single presiding subject, logically developed and concluded. However, these poetic species have an old world aura about their subject and style, and are different from the modern Nazm, supposed to have come into vogue in the later part of the nineteenth century.

Foreign forms such as the sonnet, azad nazm or (Free verse) and haiku have also been used by some modern Urdu poets.

Probably the most widely recited, and memorised genre of contemporary Urdu poetry is nāt—panegyric poetry written in praise of the Prophet Muhammad. Nāt can be of any formal category, but is most commonly in the ghazal form. The language used in Urdu nāt ranges from the intensely colloquial to a highly Persified formal language. The great early twentieth century scholar Imam Ahmad Raza Khan, who wrote many of the most well known nāts in Urdu (the collection of his poetic work is Hadaiq-e-Baqhshish), epitomised this range in a ghazal of nine stanzas (bayt) in which every stanza contains half a line each of Arabic, Persian, formal Urdu, and colloquial Hindi. The same poet composed a salām—a poem of greeting to the Prophet Muhammad, derived from the unorthodox practice of qiyam, or standing, during the mawlid, or celebration of the birth of the Prophet—Mustafā Jān-e Rahmat, which, due to being recited on Fridays in some Urdu speaking mosques throughout the world, is probably the more frequently recited Urdu poems of the modern era.

Another important genre of Urdu prose are the poems commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussain Allah hiss salam and Battle of Karbala, called noha (نوحہ) and marsia. Anees and Dabeer are famous in this regard.
Indian film industry has long history of Urdu Poetry in the songs, in fact, popularity and success is some time song dependent. The quality of language and expression is much higher than Hindi language.

Terminology

Ash'ār (اشعار) (Couplet). It consists of two lines, Misra (مصرعہ); first line is called Misra-e-oola (مصرع اولی) and the second is called 'Misra-e-sānī' (مصرعہ ثانی). Each verse embodies a single thought or subject (sing) She'r (شعر).

Urdu poetry example

As in Ghalib's famous couplet where he compares himself to his great predecessor, the master poet Mir:

The official language of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire, and their successor states, as well as the cultured language of poetry and literature, was Persian, while the language of religion was Arabic. Most of the Sultans and nobility in the Sultanate period were Turks from Central Asia who spoke Turkic as their mother tongue. The Mughals were also from Central Asia, they spoke Turkish as their first language; however the Mughals later adopted Persian. Persian became the preferred language of the Muslim elite of north India before the Mughals entered the scene. Babur's mother tongue was Turkish and he wrote exclusively in Turkish. His son and successor Humayun also spoke and wrote in Turkish. Muzaffar Alam, a noted scholar of Mughal and Indo-Persian history, suggests that Persian became the lingua franca of the empire under Akbar for various political and social factors due to its non-sectarian and fluid nature. The influence of these languages on Indian apabhramshas led to a vernacular that is the ancestor of today's Urdu. Dialects of this vernacular are spoken today in cities and villages throughout Pakistan and northern India. Cities with a particularly strong tradition of Urdu include Delhi, Hyderabad, Karachi, Lucknow and Lahore.

The name Urdu

The term Urdu came into use when Shah Jahan built the Red Fort in Delhi. The word Urdu itself comes from a Turkic word ordu, "tent" or "army", from which English also gets the word "horde". Hence Urdu is sometimes called "Lashkarī zabān", Persian for "the language of the army". Furthermore, armies of India often contained soldiers with various native tongues. Hence, Urdu was the chosen language to address the soldiers as it abridged several languages.

Wherever Muslim soldiers and officials settled, they carried Urdu with them. Urdu enjoyed commanding status in the literary courts of late Muslim rulers and Nawabs, and flourished under their patronage, partially displacing Persian as the language of elite in the then Indian society.

Urdu continued as one of many languages in Northwest India. In 1947, Urdu was established as the national language of Pakistan in the hope that this move would unite and homogenise the various ethnic groups of the new nation. Urdu suddenly went from a language of a minority to the language of the majority. It also became the official language of some of the various states of India. Today, Urdu is taught throughout Pakistani schools and spoken in government positions, and it is also common in much of Northern India. Hindi, which is very similar to Urdu, is the official language of India.

Urdu and Hindi

Because of their identical grammar and nearly identical core vocabularies, most linguists do not distinguish between Hindi and Urdu as separate languages—at least not in reference to the informal spoken registers. For them, ordinary informal Urdu and Hindi can be seen as variants of the same language (Hindustani) with the difference being that Urdu is supplemented with a Perso-Arabic vocabulary and Hindi a Sanskritic vocabulary. Additionally, there is the convention of Urdu being written in Perso-Arabic script, and Hindi in Devanagari. The standard, "proper" grammars of both languages are based on Khariboli grammar — the dialect of the Delhi region. So, with respect to grammar, the languages are mutually intelligible when spoken, and can be thought of as two written variants of the same language.

Hindustani is the name often given to this language as it developed over hundreds of years throughout India (which formerly included what is now Pakistan). In the same way that the core vocabulary of English evolved from Old English (Anglo-Saxon) but includes a large number of words borrowed from French and other languages (whose pronunciations often changed naturally so as to become easier for speakers of English to pronounce), what may be called Hindustani can be said to have evolved from Sanskrit while borrowing many Persian and Arabic words over the years, and changing the pronunciations (and often even the meanings) of those words to make them easier for Hindustani speakers to pronounce. Therefore, Hindustani is the language as it evolved organically.

Linguistically speaking, Standard Hindi is a form of colloquial Hindustani, with lesser use of Persian and Arabic loanwords, while inheriting its formal vocabulary from Sanskrit; Standard Urdu is also a form of Hindustani, de-Sanskritised, with a significant part of its formal vocabulary consisting of loanwords from Persian and Arabic. The difference, thus is in the vocabulary, and not the structure of the language.

The difference is also sociolinguistic: When people speak Hindustani (i.e., when they are speaking colloquially) speakers who are Muslims will usually say that they are speaking Urdu, and those who are Hindus will typically say that they are speaking Hindi, even though they are speaking essentially the same language.

The two standardised registers of Hindustani — Hindi and Urdu — have become so entrenched as separate languages that often nationalists, both Muslim and Hindu, claim that Hindi and Urdu have always been separate languages. However, there are unifying forces. For example, it is said that Indian Bollywood films are made in "Hindi", but the language used in most of them is Urdu. The dialogue is frequently developed in English and later translated to an intentionally neutral Hindustani which can be easily understood by speakers of most North Indian languages, both in India and in Pakistan.

Urdu and Bollywood

The part of the Indian film industry based in Mumbai is often called Bollywood (بالی وڈ). The language used in Bollywood movies uses a vocabulary that could be understood by Urdu and Hindi speakers alike. The film industry wants to reach the largest possible audience, and it cannot do that if the vocabulary is too one-sidedly Sanskritized or Persianized. This rule is broken only for song lyrics, which use elevated, poetic language. Often, this means using poetic Urdu words of Arabic and Persian origin. A few films, like Jodha Akbar, Umrao Jaan, Pakeezah, Heer Raanjha, Mughal-e-Azam and The Chess Players, have used vocabulary that leans more towards Urdu, as they depict places and times when Urdu would have been used. From the 1950s through the 1970s, Bollywood films displayed the name of the film in Hindi, Urdu, and Roman scripts. Most Bollywood films today present film titles in the Roman alphabet along with the Devanagari script, however sometimes Nasta`liq scripts are used as well.